Lower class size and school integration go hand in hand

Class sizes in the city have increased sharply since 2007 and are 15% to 30% percent bigger on average than the rest of the state. (iStock)

Friday marks the 65th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court ruled that separate can never be equal in a decision supposed to lead to the integration of schools nationwide. Yet New York City schools remain some of the most segregated in the nation.

More than 15 years ago, New York’s highest court ruled that New York City students were denied their constitutional right to a sound basic education, in part because their class sizes were too large. Yet despite repeated budget surpluses, class sizes in our public schools are even larger now in many grades.

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Class sizes in the city have increased sharply since 2007 and are 15% to 30% percent bigger on average than the rest of the state. More than 336,000 students were crammed into classes of 30 or more this fall. In the early grades, the number of first-through-third graders in classes this large has ballooned by nearly 3000 percent since 2007.

This trend should be alarming to anyone but particularly to those of us who advocate for integration. As we push to create classrooms that are diverse in race, ethnicity, gender, language, ability and more, we need to simultaneously push for small classes because this will make culturally relevant pedagogy more effective and truly differentiated instruction possible.

As schools begin to enroll students of diverse backgrounds, both racially and economically, this will further highlight the reality that children from disadvantaged backgrounds need more support from their teachers to reach the same goals, and that equality isn’t the same as real equity. Integration alone without small classes cannot erase those differences.

Integration involves much more than student assignment or moving bodies around. Many integration advocates in NYC embrace the framework developed by a student group, IntegrateNYC. The 5Rs of integration call for race and enrollment, representation, resources, restorative justice and relationship.

The last R, relationship, requires teachers to teach culturally relevant pedagogy that honors and respects each student’s history, ancestry, culture and lived experiences. Teachers will need to be masters of differentiated instruction and get to know each student at a more personal level. The teaching force will need professional development to be able to reach a diverse classroom of students.

But more training is not enough: We must also have small class sizes to allow teachers to deepen their interactions with students and meaningfully individualize instruction. All students benefit from smaller classes in terms of heightened engagement, fewer disciplinary problems and increased learning, but, as studies show, students of color benefit the most.

Without smaller classes, integration may merely lead to more segregation and stratification within schools through increased tracking. Teachers often complain that it is too difficult to target their instruction to students at different achievement levels, and indeed it is especially difficult given the large classes in NYC schools.

But if class sizes were reduced, it would make teachers’ jobs much easier and allow them to provide the feedback and support students need. Personal relationships between teachers and students inspire and enable the sort of persistence and commitment necessary for success, difficult if not impossible to achieve in classes of 28, 30 or more. Racial disparities between students and teachers matter less because they can better relate as individuals rather than as stereotypes.

In Finland, when the government decided to stop tracking, the national teachers union demanded reductions in class size to ensure that they could meet the needs of students of different academic levels. Both the elimination of tracking and the lowering of class sizes helped lead to the rapid improvement of Finnish schools in the 1970s, now among the world’s best.

Sixty-five years after the seminal ruling on school segregation, our students can’t wait any longer for a serious push to integrate schools. Yet they should not have to wait longer for smaller classes either. We must tackle both problems concurrently and with the same sense of moral urgency.

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Tanikawa is the co-chair of the Education Council Consortium and a member of the citywide School Diversity Advisory Group. Haimson is the executive director of Class Size Matters.